I live upstairs, and so there are moments when the prosody of ascending these steps will dog my thoughts. Some nights I pad my way over them, my stealth a product of an Inspector Clouseau-like state of alert, an arbitrary pang of self-consciousness, and possibly the 18-month old girl next door who might be down for a nap. You bastards won't get me, or dude you look at me like that you better be packin' heat, or if you surveillance assassin asshats wake up Hannah, we're all going to hear it.
Other times I want to make the concrete and metal support bar hum and sing, because I'm full of my bad self and there are Girl Scout cookies in the freezer and if I happen to breathe before I suck down an entire sleeve of thin mints, well maybe this time I happen to be savoring. What's it to ya?
But tonight the sun is pulling out like the tide, the cool evening air easing over my skin and through my hair. Inside, the low lights I left for myself inspire a common waking dream of years ago, a low and granulated nimbus meant to hold a deep meditation, a silence that invites thunder reports from the far side of a wide valley floor. For a few moments, I can grasp the air of a dreamt home in my mind's eye. It will retire just as quickly as the evening releases the sun and pulls the stars into relief, but my mind holds, as if for hours. I like that place where a gentle night sky ushers everyone into their hearts, voiceless and reflecting on what we have brought ourselves into, every day a chance to notice the day itself, and our presence within it.
The singular grace of that moment is that no one can ever say by what event it ends.
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Each morning we would drive up to a point a few corners down from where we stopped the day before. We would get out of the truck and walk up around a corner quietly, and we would see all the wildlife that hung out together on the bare road that held the warmth from the previous suns day.
We would always be treated to big horn sheep, mountain goats, marmots, and if lucky, an elk.
If only I could have made a living working up there...
That's just so lovely. It reminds me of Spring evenings, and of something my very non-poetic husband once said about lying in bed with the windows wide open.